How Do You Handle an Annoying Friend?

Life lessons for flawed people

Welcome back to Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! Today’s question comes from Maisie, which is not her real name, because I don’t want trouble:

“I walk home from school with my friends Lily and Bella. Sometimes Lily and I will start singing and Bella will join in. The problem is she sings with this squeaky, high pitched voice that goes up and down with no rhyme or reason. It was funny at first but that was over 3 years ago. How do I get Bella to stop singing without telling her that she’s very tone deaf?”

First of all, Maisie: the fact that you’re reading this column is ADORABLE.

I’m guessing you found your way here because you read one of my books for middle-grade kids. (Probably this one, or maybe this one, although the best one’s actually this one.)

the most likely portal through which Maisie arrived

And I couldn’t be more grateful to you, not just for lowering the median age of my readership by a frankly staggering number of years, but for asking a question that’s relevant no matter how old you are.

Every one of us, provided we’re lucky enough to have friends, has at least one who’s annoying.

In fact, if I dug deep, I could make a case for ALL of my friends being annoying. And regrettably, they could say the same of me.

But having reached an age where at least a couple of my friendships are half a century old, I’d like to zoom out and offer some speculation about the longer arc of your and Bella’s relationship.

Since I’ve never met you, Bella, or Lily, what follows might be wildly off base.

But I doubt it. I think I can make a pretty decent guess as to what your future holds.

I’m not talking about the future Mark Zuckerberg wants to create, where you replace Bella with a flawless and unfailingly supportive A.I. chatbot friend, but the normal everyday future of the kind of friendship that’s been around for as long as there have been people.

And here’s the bad news, Maisie:

The singing is going to be the least of your problems.

Bella strikes me as being what my kids’ generation calls “extra.” She’s got the normal variety of human flaws—probably clustered around the talking-too-much-and-too-loudly, not-reading-the-room categories—but in a quantity about twenty percent above the average.

Worse, Bella lacks the self-awareness to recognize, let alone correct, these flaws. And she’s probably insecure enough that if you offer constructive criticism, no matter how gently, you’ll risk wounding her in ways that time can’t heal.

Years, possibly decades later, she’ll STILL be bringing up that one time you and Lily told her she couldn’t sing. So when you get to the end of your rope and finally have to say something to her about the off-key singing, choose your words carefully.

There’s a decent chance they’ll be repeated back to you at your twentieth high school reunion.

Here’s what else you can expect between now and then:

Pretty soon, unless it’s already happened, your circle of friends will all get phones. Inevitably, you’ll start a group chat.

Bella will post to it MUCH too often. It’ll get so annoying that eventually, you’ll have to start a smaller group chat that excludes Bella, just so you have an outlet for all of your eye-rolling comments about the stuff she’s posting.

Then someone—possibly you, maybe Lily—will accidentally post one of the eye-rolling comments in the main chat.

And there will be drama.

But not as much drama as the first time, somewhere in mid-to-late adolescence, that you all set out to get drunk. Somebody’s older brother will buy you a bottle of vodka, and Bella will have very specific and strongly held opinions about the kind of mixers you should get.

She will also totally overdo it and wind up vomiting all over whatever basement rec room you’ve gathered in, at which point everybody’s parents will be called.

Your parents will ground you for a month, Lily’s parents will take her phone away, and Bella’s parents will let her off with a concerned lecture about the dangers of alcoholism. In the aftermath, Bella will be unable to understand why everybody’s so mad at her.

But not as mad as they will be during your senior year of high school, when Lily and her first real boyfriend break up, and three weeks later, Bella hooks up with him.

At this point, the group chat will disintegrate.

So will Lily and Bella’s friendship. For the rest of senior year, you’ll have to navigate the delicate challenge of remaining friends with both of them while making sure they never appear in the same room together.

You will attend separate colleges, hopefully hundreds of miles apart.

In the middle of freshman year, Bella will have a mental health episode. It will be minor, but only in retrospect. While on the phone with her at the height of it, you will offer to drive through the night to her campus and help her through it.

To your surprise and chagrin, she will accept your offer. For most of the very long drive home after the situation has stabilized, you will ruminate over why you didn’t take the offramp during the Lily’s-boyfriend fiasco, while also feeling guilty for thinking about dumping Bella as a friend while she’s still under observation at university health services.

When she gets out, she will send you flowers. That gesture of appreciation, plus inertia and geographic distance, will be enough to keep the friendship going.

The weddings are going to be a whole other thing.

Both yours and hers.

She’ll ask you to be a bridesmaid, and you will accept. Then you’ll realize this puts you on the hook for co-planning the bachelorette party Bella insists on having in Las Vegas, along with another bridesmaid who you barely know but quickly begin to suspect of suffering from either borderline personality disorder, or a substance abuse problem, or possibly both.

I’ll spare you the details of the bachelorette party and the subsequent wedding, which almost gets called off. They’re not great.

Your own wedding will be lovely, except that you’ll have to choose between the equally fraught options of either making both Bella and Lily bridesmaids—because after all these years, they will still hate each other’s guts—or just making Lily a bridesmaid and dealing with Bella’s inevitable meltdown when she finds out she’s been demoted.

Once again, you will find yourself asking whether this friendship is worth the hassle.

It is.

Here’s why: somewhere along the line, something bad is going to happen to you. Hopefully not too bad, and it’s just the one thing, but even the happiest life has some pain in it.

And when you’re going through that pain, Bella will show up for you. She will be the friend you need in that moment, and she will somehow manage to say exactly the right words to comfort you.

Well, maybe not exactly, because it’s still Bella. She’ll screw it up a little. But she’ll get the critical parts right.

Even more importantly, she will hug you in the way you desperately need to be hugged, and not even get mad that you’re ugly-crying so hard you get snot in her hair.

As she stands by you during your lowest, saddest moment, you will forgive all of her many little annoyances. Yes, she’s a flawed person—just like you’re flawed, and I’m flawed, and everybody’s flawed, except that Bella’s slightly more flawed.

But down deep, she is a good-hearted, dependable, and true friend, of the kind that Mark Zuckerberg’s stupid chatbots will never replace.

Although if I’m being honest, I have to admit a chatbot might be a really good source of ideas for how to let Bella down gently on the singing thing. Have you asked ChatGPT how to handle this? It can’t replace your friends, but it might be able to replace your advice columnist.

Thanks for your interest in my bad advice, Maisie! And for anybody else who’s read this far: please ask me a question! I can’t do this without you.